Getting Back To E-Business

Written by Tim Ward

It's that time of year again, folks. The calm after holiday storm. All your relatives have finally gone home. You've settled back in at work after far too few days off. The kids are back in school. The neighbors have finally taken down those 1,253,890 Christmas lights that kept causing brownouts in neighborhood all December. And, most importantly, you finally have time to get back on internet.

Of course, after a long strenuous holiday season, it may not be possible to just jump right back into your previous internet routine. You may need a little assistance from a Trained Internet Professional. Someone who knows 'ropes', and can get you back in cyberspace 'swing of things' in no time. Unfortunately, unless you're willing to pay $24.95 and download several e-books, it looks like only help you're going to get will be in form of:

The Online Jester's Getting Back To E-Business Checklist 2003

(1) Get That Email Caught Up

First and foremost, you'll want to get caught up on your unread email. Resist urge to just delete all thousands of emails in your inbox. After all there may actually be a few important emails hiding in there amongst spam and hundreds of emails from every website you've ever visited wishing you 'happy holidays' in a desperate attempt to get you to visit their website again.

For instance, you may have received an email or two from old friends who care about you so much that instead of doing something insincere like coming to visit you, or calling you on telephone, they, being real friends that they are, have sent you a free e-card that takes 3 minutes to load and, quite possibly, contains a virus. These are types of emails you want to be sure you don't delete.

You'll also want to be sure and save any emails that have unreadable subject lines, or no subject line at all, as these emails are usually from your mother.

I recommend getting your email caught up ASAP, even if it means skipping a few meals, because until all email is read you cannot move on to second point on our checklist, which is:

(2) Checking All Your Statistics

Since it's a new year, and you've been away from cyberspace for awhile, you'll want to find out where you stand financially online. This means checking your statistic pages and account balances for all affiliate and paid-to programs you have ever joined. This means remembering a LOT of passwords. Unless you're like me and use same password for everything. Then all you'll have to remember are all your different login and user IDs. These are even harder to recall than passwords, because, whereas your password is usually something sensible like your mother's maiden name backwards-in German or your age, weight, and favorite vegetable combined, User IDs have a tendency to get out of hand. One problem is that first three IDs or logins you choose will already be taken. This never fails. Even if you are first person to ever sign up at website, your first 3 (or more) choices will be 'already in use'. So now you have to rack your brain for more. So usually you come up with something weird like 'crzyychick02', or 'stud78man4', or in an extreme case-'mike'. All of which, needless to say, you will lose countless brain cells trying to remember. So while you still have amount of cerebral activity left that is needed to read, we will move on to our third point on our checklist, which is:

"Why So Many Bleep Words?"

Written by Shellie Rushing Tomlinson

My family watched a lot of movies over holidays; at least we tried to. It's about impossible to find good clean entertainment anymore. We did have a TV Guardian to bleep bad words, but poor thing was overworked. It bleeped itself into early retirement other night. Which got me to thinking--I'd love to see a breakdown on birthplaces of movie producers and writers. There can't be more than a handful of true southerners in bunch. Think about it.

It's like today's movies are required to have a certain number of expletives. I can almost see big execs reviewing a movie and saying, "What bleep? There wasn't but 73 bleeping bleep words in this whole bleeping movie! Somebody's bleeping head's gonna roll!"